The aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth is a monument to yet another failed dream
of EU integration

No sooner had the Queen cracked a bottle of whisky over the bow of the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, the 65,000-ton aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, than we were being told that this was “a proud moment for the whole of Britain”, marking “the return of a sense of national ambition”, reflecting both “a past full of glory” and “a future full of potential”.

Of course, as this long controversial project reached such a symbolic moment, there were mutterings round the edges. Why would it not be until 2020 that any aircraft would be available to fly off it – the largely US-built vertical take-off F-35s, which have been through as many design changes as the ship itself? Why was its vast flight deck not equipped to handle conventional fixed-wing aircraft? Why was it not, like its US counterparts, to be nuclear-powered, but driven by diesel and gas turbines, requiring more refuelling auxiliaries than the Royal Navy can any longer provide? Equally unequipped is the Navy with ships to provide the escort cover this carrier will need.

If in many ways the resulting monster ship is like that proverbial camel – “a horse designed by a committee” – the real question is, obviously, what purpose is it meant to serve? Why was a ship almost as large as the rest of the Navy put together wanted in the first place? The real story behind this goes back to 1996, when we and our EU colleagues were discussing ways to integrate the EU’s defence efforts. Our then defence secretary, Michael Portillo, signed a “Letter of Intent” with his French counterpart setting up 23 Anglo-French naval study groups, including one on “Future aircraft carrier development”.

In 1998 this led to the St-Malo agreement between Tony Blair and President Chirac to work on a new integrated EU defence force. This led in turn to the 1999 “Helsinki goals”, centred on setting up a European “Rapid Reaction Force” able to operate anywhere in the world. A major contribution to this would be three giant aircraft carriers, two built by Britain, one by France, with other navies such as those of Spain and Italy providing the necessary escort cover.

Such was the reason why, 15 years later, we saw the first of these mighty ships launched, after skewing our defence budget to the tune of £6 billion. We didn’t hear much of the involvement in the ship’s design of the French arms giant Thales, mainly responsible for building its French counterpart. But history has now moved on. We also don’t hear much these days about the EU’s “Rapid Reaction Force”.

Thus are we left with a ship with no real purpose other than to act as the monument to yet another failed dream of EU integration. It is scarcely a “moment for pride” that we should leave our once truly proud Royal Navy equipped with little more than “HMS White Elephant”.

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No, BBC, computer models aren’t 'evidence’

In all the excitement over a ruling by the head of the BBC complaints department that it had been “wrong” to allow the climate sceptic Lord Lawson to appear on the Today programme alongside a real scientist – Prof Sir Brian Hoskins – one rather important thing was missed. As one of our chief cheerleaders for climate change alarmism, Hoskins is a computer modeller, funded at Imperial College by Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire who believes that global warming is the gravest threat facing the planet.

Indeed, the BBC was quite right to claim that the “evidence” presented in that debate last February had been “inaccurate and misleading”. But the culprit in this respect was not Lord Lawson, but Sir Brian himself. He reeled off all the familiar “evidence” for believing that the world is faced with dangerous warming. More humidity in the atmosphere is causing more floods; polar ice is melting; sea levels could by 2100 rise by up to 3ft; temperatures could rise by “between 3C-5C”. But if Hoskins consulted the actual scientific evidence, rather than just relying on those computer models, he would see that none of these things is happening.

From the official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite data on humidity (shown on the “atmosphere page” of the science blog Watts Up With That), we see it has actually been falling. Not even the latest technical report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could find any evidence that rainfall and floods were increasing. As for polar ice, put the Arctic and the Antarctic together and there has lately been more sea ice than at any time since records began (see the Cryosphere Today website). NOAA’s data show that the modest 200-year-long rise in sea levels has slowed to such an extent that, if its recent trend continues, by the end of the century the sea will have risen by less than seven inches.

As for Sir Brian’s claim that by 2100 temperatures will have risen by a further “3C-5C”, not even the IPCC dares predict anything so scary. He was never more wobbly than when trying to explain away why there has now been no rise in average global temperatures for 17 years, making a nonsense of all those earlier IPCC computer projections that temperatures should by now be rising at 0.3C every decade.

How tellingly upside down it is, therefore, that the BBC should rule that “Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence of computer models”. Like Hoskins, the BBC has long shown that its group-think “narrative” is based entirely on those same models. Which is why it now seems more determined than ever to prevent its audiences from being given the actual facts, which are all that proper scientists should recognise as evidence.

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A road near Langport, Somerset, today and (inset) flooded in January of this year (PA)

Nice to see you, Charles, but Owen is the hero of Somerset

When Prince Charles last week returned to one of the villages at the centre of last winter’s Somerset flood disaster, the message from the locals could not have been more upbeat. The villagers of Muchelney thanked him for all he did when he visited them in February, when, as one report put it, he at last “stirred the authorities” into action. But having followed this drama in the county where I live from the inside, I marvel at how little the outside world understood what really happened.

Welcome though Prince Charles’s interventions have been, it was not he who galvanised the “authorities” into action. The real unsung hero of this story has been our Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who had already come down to Somerset in January, for private briefings from some key local experts, notably a team from the Royal Bath & West agricultural society.

Having impressed them with his practical grasp of the issues, Paterson within 16 hours drew up a “20-year action plan”, to do all that was needed to avert any repeat of our recent flooding disasters.

This was centred on dredging the rivers that had been allowed to silt up; the setting up of a properly funded Somerset Rivers Board, uniting local councils, experts and farmers with the Environment Agency to bring the Levels back under proper management; and a “barrage” to prevent silt being washed back up the main drainage river by the second-highest tides in the world.

Since then Paterson has kept a close eye on all that was happening, and when he visited yet again last week he was cheered to learn what real progress is being made on all sides.

Not only are the local bodies, including the Environment Agency, working well together, there is also the prospect of proper funding from many directions, including £13 million from the public bodies and private firms making up the Local Enterprise Partnership, and £3 million from the Bath & West, representing local farmers. Dredging has gone so well that there is little risk of a repeat of last winter.

For years now, Paterson has had the powerful “environmental” lobby foaming at the mouth, because he has dared to question so many of their fashionable delusions. But it is hard to think of any minister whose decisive, down-to-earth leadership has been more effective in helping to solve such an immense practical problem.